UKCloud Creates an Open Source Alternative for UK Public Sector with Red Hat OpenStack Platform

Government cloud provider liberates customers from proprietary cloud platforms with cost-effective, secure cloud services based on open innovation

BARCELONA - OPENSTACK SUMMIT
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24 octobre 2016
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that UKCloud, the foremost public cloud provider for UK government, has standardized on Red Hat OpenStack Platform with Red Hat Ceph Storage to lead its public sector customers through their digital transformation journey. The Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud platform is designed to enable UKCloud’s customers to deliver digital services directly to citizens by providing the required levels of scalability, performance and assurance.

Our move to Red Hat OpenStack Platform as a highly scalable and open platform is a direct response to our customers’ need to deliver on their digital transformation strategies. We were confident that Red Hat’s upstream-first development model would deliver a fit-for-purpose, more secure platform, and working in tight collaboration we have been able to offer our new OpenStack-based solution to customers in a short time frame.”

Simon HansfordCEO, UKCloud

UKCloud provides a public cloud for U.K. public sector organizations across industries such as healthcare, defense and police and justice, including the Cabinet Office, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), Home Office, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and Ministry of Defence (MOD). Its services are used extensively to host both citizen web applications and sensitive government systems available through public sector networks. With an increasing need to support genuine cloud-native applications for customers at the forefront of digital services innovation, UKCloud needed to complement its proven enterprise platform with open technologies powered by Red Hat.

With its core principle of offering services that are easy to adopt, easy to use, and easy to transition, UKCloud actively promotes open source as an alternative to proprietary global cloud platforms. In addition, its customers increasingly require native compatibility with Infrastructure-as-Code tools that is key to enabling the fast pace of innovation across the public sector. This led UKCloud to select OpenStack as the basis for its disruptive Cloud Native Infrastructure service.

Central to UKCloud’s choice of Red Hat as an OpenStack technology partner was its proven experience in developing secure, production-ready platforms for enterprises around the world, backed by trusted technical expertise and support. UKCloud approached Red Hat to deliver a pilot environment for a select group of its pioneering customers. Very quickly, Red Hat OpenStack Platform met the performance, scalability and security standards UKCloud’s customers need, and UKCloud were able to rapidly move to a production service. Integral to this, UKCloud invested in Red Hat Ceph Storage to enable flexible and cost-effective cloud data storage underpinned by the assurance of reliability at scale.

Working closely, Red Hat and UKCloud were able to build the production environment within a tight timescale of just six months. This enabled them to meet the deadlines of G-Cloud, the U.K. government’s initiative to ease the procurement process for public sector bodies using technology services based on cloud computing. UKCloud continues to contribute innovation back into the open source community and encourages the inter-departmental sharing of best practice within its public sector and partner communities.

Supporting Quotes

Simon Hansford, CEO, UKCloud

“Our continued focus is to enable our public sector customers to offer intuitive, reliable and trusted services to UK citizens. Our adoption of Red Hat OpenStack Platform as a highly scalable and open platform is a direct response to our customers’ need to deliver digital cloud native applications which comply with the U.K. government’s strategy of embracing open source and open standards rather than proprietary platforms. We were confident that Red Hat’s extensive open-source capability and expertise would enable us to deliver a proven, highly secure and massively scalable platform. Red Hat were able to provide us with experts and resources to accelerate the launch of our new OpenStack-based Cloud Native Infrastructure service, on which customers are already deriving value. We are committed to bringing the latest innovations to the U.K. public sector and Red Hat’s upstream-first development model and commitment to the open source community is a key part of that.”

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat

“It is a privilege to work with UKCloud, who is at the forefront of enabling customers to embrace a digital approach to serving UK citizens. As the market leading public cloud provider to U.K. public sector, UKCloud has used its scale and focus to continue to innovate. Powered by Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage, UKCloud is now armed with an open cloud solution which complies with U.K. government’s digital strategy of transforming public sector services in the U.K.”

About Red Hat

Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As a connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.

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En bref

As UKCloud expanded the amount of public sector service applications they were supporting, they chose the open source, scalable environment of Red Hat OpenStack Platform to build customer functionality that could match the pace of innovation.